It appears there have not
been enough violent incidents on aircraft in the past 12 years.

So, what can authorities do to help the problem?

Vending machine operators cannot put weapons in vending machines
for sale to embarking passengers. Or sell weapons in coffee shops in secured
concourse and gate areas of airports. Passengers have been disarmed for
the past 12 years at checkpoints of everything from nail clippers to firearms.
More than a few ounces of mouthwash has been prohibited over this same
period of time.

What better way to arm passengers, than to let the passengers themselves
bring a weapon(s) with them and then allow them through security checkpoints?
But there is a problem: ANY kind of knife poses a threat to flight
attendants, and their union has made their position on passengers with
knives well known.

So why would TSA start allowing weapons? What could be the purpose?
In a television interview on 3/14/13, TSA director claimed that "Knives
cannot bring down an aircraft."

Consider the following scenario. A psychotropic drug patient or
mind-controlled passenger brings a knife aboard a airliner. During the
flight, he begins grabbing and killing passengers and flight attendants
one by one while demanding the pilot open the cockpit door. A flight attendant
is on the phone with the pilot giving him a blow-by-blow description.
How much violence will the pilot or cockpit crew listen to before they
break and feel guilt, despite their training? What is the cockpit crew's
threshold of pain? Suppose one of the flight attendants grabbed by armed
passenger, was the pilot's bed partner the night before and is next to
be killed? What then?

But thanks to technology there is a solution. Once a passenger or
psychiatric patient has committed a knife crime, TSA will quickly get
authority to take the next step: Taser bracelets. Is this something new?
Not at all. In fact, this concept was proposed almost FIVE years ago and
appeared in a USA Today article:

"In 2008, the Washington Times reported on how DHS official Paul
S. Ruwaldt of the Science and Technology Directorate, office of Research
and Development, wrote to Lamperd Less Lethal, Inc. indicating that the
Department of Homeland Security was ready to purchase devices from the
company that would be used to deliver incapacitating shocks to airline
passengers, all of whom would be mandated to wear the taser bracelet once
they checked in for their flight."[1]

Whenever there is a taser bracelet someone, at least one member
of the flight crew on the aircraft has the remote control to activate
it. HOW the CORRECT bracelet will be accurately activated on demand has
never been disclosed - perhaps all the passengers will get shocked.

Remember the flight attendant who used the emergency escape chute
on the plane for fun? That actually happened back in August of 2010 at
JetBlue at JFK airport. Steven Slater grabbed a beer, deployed the slide
and used it to exit the aircraft. [2]

Suppose a flight attendant doesn't like the way you talked to them?
They could press the button on the taser remote control in their pocket,
zap the passenger and later claim, "I pressed it by mistake when I was
reaching for a pen." If the passenger has a weak heart they could die
from the 50,000 volt shock.

There seems to be ample indication that all aircraft passengers
will eventually be wearing taser bracelets.

What comes next - riders on city buses, train passengers, cruise
ship passengers?

The continuing and endlessly repeated message from the media based on
WHO’s report is that health damage from the Fukushima nuclear disaster
is more psychological than actual (3). If you are worried about radiation
you are probably paranoid, and that victims “should smile often” to reduce
the negative health impacts of radiation. These depraved assertions are
indicative of the specious and insidious lengths WHO and their media lackeys
are prepared to go in order to obfuscate and cover-up what is one of the
most severe threats to human health in modern history.

Even though the global media is controlled by just a handful of mega-corporations
(4; 5), some people (perhaps too few of them) - to their credit - do not
instantly accept the WHO’s findings and are now becoming more vocal in
their demands for accurate information.

The results of an investigation are only as good as the effort put into
it. Many observers have criticized the WHO for ignoring relevant data
and basing their conclusions on theoretical assumptions, a biased selection
process and insufficient empirical data. According to Simply Info:

The methodology used for the WHO cancer projection risk report fails in a
number of ways. Instead of attempting to build a few sample detailed
profiles of exposure, they used highly generalized on paper estimates
then applied them to entire populations. The WHO study is not based off
of real world recorded exposure data in humans. It is instead very rough
on paper estimates based off of government environmental radiation
readings and food testing. The WHO study also threw out all data from
the evacuation zone, where most people were actually exposed. Their
study completely lacks this important data in their calculations (6).

The WHO threw out or otherwise selectively omitted data from the very
areas where people were most affected. This is fraudulent science at
best if not flatly criminal in intent. As nuclear critic Paul Zimmerman
has found in his lengthy investigation of the radiation industry, “a
clever campaign of misinformation has succeeded in making malignant
deeds appear benign.” It is typical of governments that “[f]ollowing a
radiation release, [they] avoid adequate radiation monitoring” because
it is costly and might alarm the public (p. 23; pp. 209 - 211) (7).
There is little concern for the number of people contaminated as the
Japanese government’s mishandling of the Fukushima tragedy has clearly
shown (8).

Physicians Who Do No Harm

In contrast to WHO disinformation and what may only be described as
pro-nuclear propaganda, a report from the International Physicians for
the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) has analyzed some of the available
data from Japan and found “[t]he initial health consequences of the
nuclear catastrophe are now, two years after the incident,
scientifically verifiable” (9).

Depending on which demographic group is included in the survey and the
radiation level that is considered a risk, the IPPNW estimated that
upwards to 136,872 cancer cases or serious illnesses, apparently not
including precancerous tumors on children, could occur. Bear in mind
that the IPPNW findings are conservative compared to some general
estimates that put potential cancer incidences as high as a million (10;
11; 12).

Differences in risk models tells the story. The IPPNW derive their
estimate model from the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR). The
WHO derives their estimates from such agencies as the International
Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and the United Nations
Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR). One
of the ECRR’s founding members, Dr. Chris Busby, has offered an
extensive and convincing critique as to why the WHO and their
establishment methodology for radiation risk is outdated and inaccurate
(13).

Doctors For The People And Planet

The IPPNW was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 and “is a
non-partisan federation of national medical groups in 63 countries,
representing tens of thousands of doctors, medical students, other
health workers, and concerned citizens who share the common goal of
creating a more peaceful and secure world freed from the threat of
nuclear annihilation...” (14).

Obviously, this group consists of highly professional, courageous and
conscientious individuals, most of whom have medical backgrounds and all
of whom uphold the Hippocratic Oath admonition “first, do no harm.”
IPPNW are opposed to the “nuclear annihilation” of life on planet Earth,
which is being threatened on a daily basis by the psychopaths in
criminal-controlled governments and militaries around the world.

With a cool 100 trillion dollars in their pocket, we know that it is not
only the powers-that-be that are behind our perpetual wars for
perpetual peace, but a particular group of supremely evil individuals
who employ the threat of the ultimate form of violence in order to
maintain their wealth, power, enslavement of humanity and ongoing
destruction of the biosphere (15; 16; 17).

The Cult of Nuclearists is comprised of people of a common mentality.
They embrace nuclear and radiological weapons as a reasonable element of
warfare and statecraft and are responsible for maintaining these
weapons in our midst. They have never made a serious effort to forge an
international consensus to banish nuclear weapons. They venerate the
power they wield, the threat they project, the advantage they possess
over the less powerful. They have created a world that 99.999% of
humanity abhor.... Our well-being is at the mercy of those with a
genocidal mentality. In violation of our sensibilities and sense of
decency, we have been forced to live our lives inextricably entangled in
the intrigues of petty potentates who derive their right to dictate
affairs from the brutality of the weapons they wield. The people of the
earth have unfinished business with the Cult of Nuclearists (Op. cit.,
“Paul Zimmerman,” pp. 29 - 30).

As laudable as the IPPNW’s work is, unfortunately their report, “Health consequences
from Fukushima,” which relies considerably on Japanese Ministry of Health
data, is very technical, translated from German, not very well written and
disappointing in some respects. It is a very short report (four pages) and
some important information is not clearly explained (Op. cit.).

For example, why did they not consider the number of people who were
doused with radiation from the initial accident but may have moved out
of the Fukushima region? Also, they present figures for radiation in
food that do not seem logical given food in Western Japan, where almost
no radioactive fallout occurred is listed as radioactive.

As the report states:

Some of the quantitative results of this work are subject to
uncertainty, as much of the original data has only been published in an
imprecise form and certain calculations involved making further
assumptions. Nevertheless, the IPPNW has deemed it necessary to present
this quantitative estimate in order to make clear the true dimension of
the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima.

Despite these shortcomings we should consider the IPPNW report as an
important starting point for understanding the extent of health damages
caused by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Much to their credit, this is
the first attempt by independent researchers to analyze available
empirical data according to the ECRR’s critical methodology, which is
the reason the numbers of deaths that may occur is quite startling and
in stark contrast to the mainstream discourse and disinformation
campaign being waged.

The IPPNW report is “based on publications in scientific journals on
soil contamination in 47 prefectures in Japan.... Approximately 20% of
the radioactive substances released into the atmosphere have led to the
contamination of the landmass of Japan with 17,000 becquerels per square
metre of cesium-137 and a comparable quantity of cesium-134.” In
addition to the estimate that over a hundred thousand people could have
serious if not fatal health affects, it is also reported that:

“Throughout the whole of Japan, the total drop in number of births
in December 2011 was 4362, with the Fukushima Prefecture registering a
decline of 209 births. Japan also experienced a rise in infant
mortality, with 75 more children dying in their first year of life than
what would be expected statistically.”

“In the Fukushima Prefecture alone, some 55,592 children were
diagnosed with thyroid gland nodules or cysts. In contrast to cysts and
nodules found in adults, these findings in children must be classified
as precancerous. There were also the first documented cases in Fukushima
of thyroid cancer in children.”

It’s A Gigantic Lie

In addition to the above estimates it must not be forgotten that contrary
to the propaganda that “no one died” specifically from the nuclear disaster
(separate from deaths from the tidal wave), in fact, many people did. Professor
Shimizu of Fukushima University has stated that “[i]t’s a lie to assert
nobody died [due to the] Fukushima accident. Over 1,300 deaths are reported
to be related to the disaster” because of the stress of evacuation (18).
That evacuation was caused by the nuclear meltdown, not directly due to
the tidal wave.

But how many of these deaths may have in fact been radiation related?

Something that was apparently not within the scope of the IPPNW’s report has been exposed by the former Japan Times Weekly Editor, Yoichi Shimatsu.

Here Shimatsu referred to the issue of spiking death rates among elderly Fukushima evacuees:

Pneumonia is nearly always the final cause of death among the elderly
(in hospitals and institutions) and therefore is often mis-reported as
the underlying or actual cause of mortality. Most Japanese hospitals did
not measure or have adequate equipment for measuring radiation dosages
(and lack the funds to pay for lab tests if the victims were not
obviously wealthy and requested radiation exposure tests on blood) and
so the effects of large radiation dosages following March 15 on
respiratory and cardiac condition of patients remains unknown for lack
of relevant data.

The government and ministries of Health and Emergencies is guilty of
negligence with probable consequences of failure to provide proper
diagnosis and appropriate treatment of patients with high levels of
radiation exposure.

The Asahi Shimbun notes the higher death rate among evacuees but
attributes it to exposure to cold, without detailed substantiation - as
to whether those patients actually came down with flu prior to their
pneumonia infection. As far as I know, there was no general or local
outbreak of flu in 2011, meaning that exposure to the elements may have
contributed to the death but was not necessarily the primary cause of
death in most cases.

A chart attached to the Asahi article shows that the rate of death,
compared to previous year, remained somewhat higher for the remainder of
2011 (personal communication, 3/13; 19).

Shimatsu also analyzed this aspect of the issue in an article posted at the Rense.com website (20).

Game Changer

The March 11, 2011 9.0 mega-quake changed Japan forever (21). Two years
after the nuclear disaster there is an unending list of seemingly
insurmountable technical challenges to be faced at the damaged reactors
(22). The social and political upshot of the nuclear disaster is that
the Japanese population has lost confidence in their government which
with the glee of madmen continues to push forward with the resumption of
nuclear business as usual. The vast majority of Japanese people are now
opposed to the now obsolete nuclear power industry in any form and are
rightfully very worried about the future nuclear direction of the
country, but seem helpless to change the course of history.

However, given that the pro-nuclear LDP party won an overwhelming
victory in last December’s election, one might diagnose the Japanese
electorate of having a kind of political schizophrenia, or perhaps it is
simply a lack of viable choices offered to them in the political
process. Simply Info reports that:

While the government has been intent on restarting reactors, public opinion has shown a desire for just the opposite.

70% want an end to nuclear power in Japan as recently as of February 2013.

80% do not trust the government on nuclear safety.

84% of businesses do not want reactors restarted.

Twitter scored considerably higher than NISA or TEPCO as a reliable
source for information on the Fukushima disaster in an Asahi Shimbun
poll.

90% want no nuclear power in Japan according to responses to a government public survey.

Only 9.6% wanted a continuation of nuclear power in Japan according to a December 2012 poll” (23).

The environmental and human health impact from the nuclear disaster has
been complex and profoundly troubling, especially for the victims, flora
and fauna inhabiting the region of Fukushima (24).

The one inescapable certainty is that the deaths resulting from this
man-made catastrophe will continue to impact and cause untold deaths,
disease and mutations worldwide from radiation far into the future.
Consequently, before this accident is repeated a second and a third time
- as it surely will be if people fail to act - it is time for humanity
to learn its lesson and put an end to nuclear power forever.

* This article could not have been written without editorial
support from my colleagues, Tony Boys, Robert S. Finnegan and Yoichi
Shimatsu. Richard Wilcox holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from a
social science, holistic perspective. He teaches at a number of
universities in the Tokyo, Japan area. His articles on environmental
topics including the Fukushima nuclear disaster are archived at http://wilcoxrb99.wordpress.com/ and are regularly published at Activist Post and Rense.com. His interviews with Jeff Rense are available at the website http://www.rense.com.